New technology can predict epileptic seizures

Researchers from the University of Melbourne and St Vincent's Hospital have developed new technology that could warn epileptics when a seizure is about to occur.

The technology, funded by US company NeuroVista, involves surgically-placed electrodes in the brain feeding information to a handheld unit carried by the patient that will alert them to the threat of a seizure.

Already tested on 15 people by the head of neurology at St Vincent's Hospital, Professor Mark Cook, and his research team, the device has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of the 60 million people around the world living with epilepsy.

"The fact that seizures are relatively brief but cause a lot of disruption means that people can't plan their lives, often it interferes with their abilities to drive and work," Professor Cook said.

"If you could predict when seizures were going to happen, it would improve people's independence a great deal."

Shedding more light on how the technology works, Professor Cook said: "This device is inserted in between, or electrodes are inserted in between the skull and the brain to continuously record the electrical activity of the brain.

"These signals are then analysed and a program is developed so, to be able to predict before seizures going to happen.

"Now this electrical information is transmitted wirelessly to a hand held unit that the patient carries that shows a series of lights."

The lights - red for high risk, white for moderate risk and blue light - represent the likelihood of a seizure in the minutes or hours ahead.

When asked about the device's accuracy, Mr Cook said that for some patients it had predicted every single one of their seizures in a high-risk period.

The fact that seizures are relatively brief but cause a lot of disruption means that people can't plan their lives. often it interferes with their abilities to drive and work.

Professor Mark Cook

He also admitted there was still room for improvement as while the blue light indicates no risk, there had been a couple of instances when patients suffered seizures.

"For some patients it works extremely well," Mr Cook said.

"For other patients it might still need a bit of fine-tuning.

"So it's possible to keep developing the system that detects the seizures or predicts the seizures, so it can be continuously improved."

At the forefront of the researchers' development plans is reducing how invasive the installation process is and creating a system compatible with mobile phones.

"We're hoping in the future that it will be possible to do it less invasively and with smaller devices," Mr Cook said.

"At the moment the handheld unit is about the size of a pager which, you know, still a relatively small, but it would be nice to get it much smaller still.

"Perhaps it would be possible one day to have these things connected to your telephone or other much smaller systems that are carried on the person anyway."